


A Dangerous Concept

by HermitLibrary_Archivist



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: M/M, season/series 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-05-26
Updated: 2008-05-26
Packaged: 2018-04-21 13:09:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4830242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HermitLibrary_Archivist/pseuds/HermitLibrary_Archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>By Nova</p><p>Imprisoned in a sensory deprivation cell, Avon saves his sanity by creating an imaginary companion - Roj Blake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Dangerous Concept

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Judith and Aralias, the archivists: This story was originally archived at [Hermit.org Blake's 7 Library](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Hermit_Library), which was closed due to maintenance costs and lack of time. To preserve the archive, we began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in August 2015. We posted announcements about the move and emailed authors as we imported, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this author, please contact us using the e-mail address on [Hermit.org Blake's 7 Library collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/hermitlibrary/profile). 
> 
> This work has been backdated to 26th of May 2008, which is the last date the Hermit.org archive was updated, not the date this fic was written. In some cases, fics can be dated more precisely by searching for the zine they were originally published in on [Fanlore](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Main_Page).
> 
> This work was originally published in Fire and Ice 6

'Reality is a dangerous concept. Each one of us interprets it in a different way.'

Terry Nation, The Way Back.

Avon passed his second hour in the cell calculating the angle at which the mutoid must have struck his wrist in order to cause his teleport bracelet to fly across the room and land at the Federation base commander's feet, just as Blake rasped, 'Jenna, teleport now!' During the first hour he had, of course, tested the door and walls for possible escape routes, finding none.

By the end of that time he had established two things. Firstly, that the odds against his bracelet unlatching were ninety eight to one, a piece of information that was statistically consoling but otherwise irrelevant. And secondly that, since none of his fellow crew members had returned to rescue him, the Liberator had presumably been driven off by the base's pursuit ships.

In which case, he would have to rely on his own resources for the time being.

He leaned back against the wall, assessing the situation. A holding cell in a Federation outpost. Seamless reinforced plass walls that blocked even the slightest sound. A self-sealing chute for ration drops, a vacuum toilet unit, a hard mattress, a rough blanket and nothing else: most importantly, no light. Conditions that came close to sensory deprivation, although he could move around to the extent that the cell's five square metres would permit.

**Still, that makes my captors' intentions reasonably clear. They plan to break me in the most economical manner possible: by snapping my links to reality and then leaving me alone to drive myself mad.**

Having always feared madness, he was paradoxically cheered by this analysis. 'Depressives used to cope better than most in Old Earth concentration camps,' he remembered Blake pontificating at one point. 'They'd been expecting the worst all their lives, so they were almost relieved when it happened.' Avon privately counted himself among the depressives and his expectations had always been low, which, if Blake was right, meant that his chances of survival were correspondingly high. Escape might be impossible but at least he had a short-term goal.

'No one breaks me,' he whispered and as his words echoed back at him, unnaturally loud in the silence, he realised what he needed to do. He would have to create an alternate form of reality, powerful enough to counter the effects of isolation and bring him through this ordeal unscathed.

'The mind is its own place and in itself

Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

What matter where, if I be still the same?'

**Fine words. Let's see whether I can prove them correct.**

To begin with, he returned to the project he had been working on, just before Blake roped him into the raid: researching Zen's basic systems, in an attempt to locate and neutralise some of the more inconvenient commands programmed into the Liberator's alien technology. Given his photographic memory, it was easy to recall the display that he had been studying and continue on from there. For a long stretch of hours he barely registered his surroundings, too absorbed in his calculations to notice the darkness or the confined space.

But Avon had never been a pure theoretician, preferring to get results by a process of trial and error. Without access to Zen, he eventually found himself stalled. A period of mounting frustration followed, during which his body began to play tricks on him. His eyes strained at the cell's artificial night, searching for variations in its impenetrable blackness and, improbably, finding them. He rubbed his eyes, looked again and saw chrysanthemum flowers of light explode on the dark, spreading and melting like fireworks. Too real: he was cringing back into a corner of the cell to escape from them before he recognised them as hallucination. Far too real: like the sea sound that turned out to be the rush of his blood, the drumbeat that he finally traced to his own heart, the voice calling his name, the chilly drafts that swept through the temperature-controlled cell.

**Illusion. All illusion. You must take control.**

He dug his fingernails into his palms - **I hurt, therefore I am** - but the pain was not convincing enough, so he jerked his wrist to his mouth and bit down hard. That steadied him. Slumping back against the wall, he caressed the dents in his flesh and began to devise ways to measure the passing of time. The intervals between the arrival of the ration bars. Careful observation of his biorhythms. A set pattern of sleep and exercise, physical and mental, to create a routine that would parallel his shifts on the Liberator.

In this manner he managed to get through two sleep cycles, fending off the hallucinations with relative ease. Then his body betrayed him again, dissolving suddenly into the dark: a hallucination so complete that for a fear-filled second Avon was convinced he no longer existed. He raked his nails down his cheeks, ploughing furrows of pain into the skin, rolled onto his stomach and ground himself full-length against the hard mattress. The harsh prickle of the blanket and an aching throb from an unnoticed erection. He gasped and wrenched at his zipper. Gripped his cock and pumped feverishly.

A fountain-burst of sensation flooded him, warm and sticky and human and real. But seconds later the warmth ebbed away, leaving him more empty and alone than before. The darkness crowded in on him. A drumbeat dinned through his ears. He leapt up, gasping for breath. Swung a fist at the vacancy. Lost balance and collapsed, swamped by a surge of terror that accelerated into a claustrophobic panic attack where he alternately raged and shouted, sobbed, hyperventilated and battered his body against the walls. Finally, frightened by the intensity of his terror, he gritted his teeth, clenched every muscle in his body and held himself still, until he had isolated the source of the fear.

**Oh, I see. So I am lonely. Apparently, even the intellectual lightweights on Liberator serve some sort of purpose. Easy enough to say 'I do not need anybody at all' when I can immerse myself in work. But right now I would even be glad to see Vila.**

Once he had defined the problem, the next step was to find a solution. If companions were what he needed, why not invent a companion? That hypothesis interested him and for a moment the darkness seemed less palpable. Then it pressed down on him with renewed force as his practical mind began to struggle with the task. What type of companion might he require? A counter-irritant to relieve his frustration? (Someone like Vila, for example.) A scapegoat for his ill temper? (Vila again.) A friend, whatever that might mean?

Or, perhaps, a lover.

**That's right, make it difficult for yourself. In case it has slipped your memory, let me remind you that you have not taken a lover in two years - and precious few before that. Are you sure you can remember what it was like?**

But, despite his self-directed sneers, the idea would not go away. It lodged under his breastbone, a fist-shaped ball of warmth. A lover. He could create an ideal lover, the lover he had never found, to be his companion here. A brief delusion to sustain and support him. To give him the sense of being needed that, in this extremity, he appeared to need.

Smiling fiercely at the dark, Avon started to make a list of the qualities his ideal would require. Confidence. An easy sensuality. Verbally adroit. Inquiring. And, above all, bright. He considered the list but, even as he approved it, he felt his heart contracting. It was too abstract or, to put it another way, he was too pragmatic to believe in abstractions. Apparently, he would have to choose from among the people he already knew.

Straight away Anna Grant's face glowed on the midnight air. Then, just as abruptly, her image dimmed. Too many painful memories there and besides, Anna's tragic death had always seemed somehow inevitable. Not Anna then, nor any of the other women or men he had slept with, since he could vividly remember his very cogent reasons for terminating those connections. No, he needed to select someone with whom he was able to contemplate beginning a liaison. Someone whom he knew well enough to predict their reactions.

Someone from the Liberator, in that case.

Stretching out on the mattress, Avon called up his crew mates, one by one. Jenna's charms were obvious but obvious charms had never appealed to him. Cally's fey pre-Raphaelite beauty came closer to his type, although, when he investigated that possibility further, he discovered that he had no idea of what went on in her mind - and preferred not to know, finding telepathy a rather disconcerting concept. Gan raised the ghost of a smile. Vila widened the smile.

**An amusing notion but not really possible to take seriously a relationship where both parties are amoral.**

Which brought him, by two simultaneous logics, to Blake. Roj Blake, possessor of the most over-active conscience at which Avon had ever lifted an eyebrow. Roj Blake, who was, unless he could come up with an alternative source of ideas, the only one left.

'Blake,' he whispered experimentally and the cell blazed with light, Blake at the centre of it, so vivid that Avon almost reached out to touch him. Stubborn chin, soft full mouth, expressive brown eyes guarded by heavy lids and eyebrows with an interrogative lift to them: and, of course, that tempting riot of curls.

Well now, it seems I remember Blake more clearly than anyone else. Does that mean he qualifies for the role I have in mind?

He expected to laugh and dismiss the idea but found himself transfixed and thrilled. Blake? Running his hands through Blake's tumbled curls? Touching a finger to Blake's full mouth? Impossible in reality but as a fantasy, the image had a certain power. And, in simple self-defence, he had certainly studied Blake enough to bring him into this cell.

What's more, he could easily identify the exact point at which he and Blake might have become lovers. The London, two days out from Earth. Avon, product of a solitary childhood and a semi-solitary student and working life, taking refuge in the shower room while the others slept and starting to shake uncontrollably in reaction to endless weeks of enforced companionship, first in the holding cells and after that on the prison ship.

Then the sudden shock of arms closing around him from behind. Knowing, without turning to check, that Blake was holding him and instinctively leaning back into the embrace, steadied against a broad warm chest until the shaking stopped and he became aware that the big hand stroking his hair had moved past reassurance and on towards desire.

**He wanted me and, at that moment, I wanted him too. But he had seen me vulnerable, which was insupportable. I pulled away and smiled at him. His heart in his eyes, open for anyone to read.

Although I dare say that melting look hardened when I strolled past him and returned to my bunk. Certainly, by the time he came to recruit me to his cause, he was surly and challenging, none of the manipulative techniques that he employed on my fellow convicts.

I was, I admit it, faintly piqued, even though I was safer that way.**

Folding his arms behind his head, Avon examined the incident. What if he had followed up on the smile by fucking Blake against the wall, then and there? No, the result would have been the same - he withdrawing afterwards to protect himself, Blake hurt and offended and, ultimately, angry. Better to imagine a situation where he rejected Blake initially and then regretted the rejection. More plausible and, in fact, closer to the truth, since he had at times felt a brief frisson of regret. Supposing he had acted on that transitory impulse, what might have happened next? Blake would, of course, have held onto his anger. He had a talent for sustained rage: against the Federation and Avon, at any rate. So it would have been necessary to plan a campaign of seduction. But how?

Interesting. I shall plan it now. That ought to keep my mind occupied for a while.

Over the next two cycles, all Avon's waking hours were spent courting an imaginary Blake. He worked on the fantasy as intently as he would have worked on one of Zen's programs, testing and adjusting and recalibrating. Inventing strategies and dismissing them in advance. Inventing strategies and watching Blake dismiss them. Inventing strategies and seeing that they would move him nearer to his goal, although not quite achieving it.

Exbar was a turning point, he decided. Shocked by having unintentionally put Blake in danger, he had abandoned his usual policy of armed neutrality and Blake had responded with an equally unusual show of ferocious protectiveness. And then, too, there was Blake's obvious interest in his pretty cousin, culminating in a farewell kiss that had made Avon wonder whether Blake was really the dedicated celibate he appeared to be.

**Ah. Jealous, were you?

A little, perhaps.**

Very well then, he could use that mixture of emotions as a prompt. He pictured himself sitting on the edge of his bunk late that night, still stirred by the day's events. Making a decision, rising and going to knock at Blake's door. With some plausible excuse: for example, needing help with the regen cast on his wounded arm, which would inevitably require him to slip off the dressing gown draped over his shoulders, offering a calculated display of white skin.

Then, as he paused to consider his next move, the dream-Blake reached out and ran a hand down his bare chest, tracking the swirls of dark hair as far as the navel, splaying a broad palm across the buckle of his belt with unmistakable intent.

Avon tensed. Up to that moment the dream-Blake had been under his control but now, suddenly, he seemed to have taken on a life of his own. It was a trifle unnerving, especially since his actions were remarkably consistent with what Avon knew of the real Blake, a man not notably given to equivocation or ambiguity.

**Well, of course. The dream-Blake is a projection, based on the data you have accumulated over the last year and a half. It has no objective reality. You are merely anticipating its reactions more quickly than when you began. 'Practice makes perfect,' they say and so your dream-Blake is now perfection.

Unlike the real Blake.**

Reassured that his enterprise was altogether reasonable, Avon allowed himself to continue. He imagined practised fingers working at the buckle. Closed his eyes and sensed the heat of Blake's body as he moved closer. Breathed Blake's remembered scent, rich as wild honey, flavoured now with an acrid tang of sweat. Leaned back and opened his mouth to Blake's kiss.

Ambushed by his imagination, he heard a gasp echo off the walls of the cell. For a brief elated instant he attributed it to Blake but even when he recognised his own voice, the spell remained unbroken. He could almost taste the slippery satin inside Blake's cheeks and the rough velvet of Blake's tongue. He could almost feel the mass of muscle under his hands and the pressure of Blake's erection, hard against his own stiff cock. So convincing - and so convincingly erotic that, after he had replayed the kiss several times to finetune the details, it seemed inevitable that he should start imagining what it would be like to fuck Blake.

That cock, to begin with. He had seen it in the shower room on Liberator, of course, but he was surprised at how clearly he remembered it. The exact shade of rose: the precise set of the balls, heavy in their chamois sac: the lush dark curls around the groin, startling in their contrast to Blake's hairless chest: and, above all, the sheer size, large enough in its ordinary state but fit for a colossus when he pictured it erect.

He shivered pleasurably and laid a hand on his own cock, to assist his memory further. As his fingers circled the shaft, the dream-Blake settled over him and pinned him to the mattress. Avon's breath caught in his lungs, trapped by an imaginary weight. His hips bore down hard. His erection swelled and lifted and strained against the dream-Blake's thigh. He stroked it at a leisurely, meditative pace, sometimes turning his hand into Blake's hand, at other times turning his cock into Blake's cock. Shifting at will between illusion and reality, confident of his ability to enjoy and master both, until suddenly, without conscious volition, the grip around the shaft tightened in an ecstatic spasm that jerked an answering spasm of ecstasy from his balls. He writhed and twisted. Whispered, 'Yes, Blake, now' and came, thrusting into the dream-Blake's fist, feeling the dream-Blake's sperm fountain between his fingers, arching and crying out and slamming himself against the dream-Blake's solid chest.

It was appallingly real. Avon sat up, shocked and panting, barely able to believe that he was alone. He wiped his hand across the blanket in a quick, dismissive gesture and curled into a ball, clutching his knees to his chest and rocking back and forth. Images of Blake forced their way past the protective barrier that he had raised against them - Blake smiling, Blake naked and sweaty, Blake touching his cheek with a look of incredulous wonder - but he groaned and pushed the images away.

**This is madness. I have begun to believe in my own creation. What next? A descent into utter imbecility?**

He lifted his head and gazed at the darkness, his mind in chaos, unable to let himself think, in case he succumbed to the fantasy again. But as he stared and shivered, another image began to form in his brain: the pages of an article he had once read, imprinted on his photographic memory. The writer had been describing the effects of sensory deprivation - fugue, vertigo, heart fibrillations, self-laceration, an inability to differentiate between dreams and waking. Disintegration of the personality, far more complete than anything he had experienced so far.

**Stop feeling sorry for yourself. There are worse forms of madness than the ability to visualise a good fuck. Consider the alternatives and you will see that, under your present circumstances, it is in fact eminently rational to take refuge in a dream-world.**

He laughed and stretched and felt his muscles begin to relax. Lounging back on the mattress, he let the dream-Blake return. A momentary twinge of fear at the power that the image had over him and then he shrugged and accepted the situation.

**Lost in the desert, people will drink their own urine to survive. My dreams are considerably less bitter - and just as necessary for survival.**

The last of his reservations slipped away. Avon sighed and gave in to the dream. During the cycles that followed, he imagined fucking Blake in every possible position and mood. Rough, tender, imperious, suppliant. In haste on the flight deck. Slow and languorous in Blake's cabin. Stroking each other's cocks, thrusting against each other's thighs, coming in each other's mouths. The first heart-pumping instant of laying claim to another man's arse.

For hours or days or more, he was caught in a sensual obsession. **As one would be, were such a reversal to take place in reality.** And later, when all that yearning and passion and fulfilment started to seem a little too loaded with sentiment, Avon smiled in pleasurable malice and began to orchestrate their first fight. It was easy enough to imagine, given that he and Blake had fought so hard and so often, although he had not anticipated the regret that he felt when the dream-Blake, incurably sentimental, lost their war of words.

He tossed and turned on the mattress, lips pinched tight on an apology. If he had been asked where he was at that moment, Avon might have been able to reply that he was in solitary confinement on the planet Kaliferon: but at another level of reality he was in his cabin on Liberator, attempting, half-reluctantly, to find a way of healing the breach with the dream-Blake. What would Blake want from him? A retraction? No, too facile. Blake would demand more than that. He would want -

**Oh yes, of course. I should have seen it before. Blake, with his mania for certainties, could hardly be satisfied with anything less than a full account of my feelings. But what do I feel? I am obsessed with the dream-Blake but do I love him?

Yes.

Well now, could I tell him so?**

An uncounted period of time, during which the normal operations of body and mind seemed to be suspended, and then, finally:

**Yes. I must.**

Sentence by painful sentence, he mapped the conversation. Sparing himself nothing, admitting every slight and evasion and retreat into defensive scorn that he would undoubtedly employ. Incorporating Blake's ready anger and Blake's manipulative brooding and Blake's overbearing determination to crash through his boundaries, all the traits that irritated him most. And yet, despite everything, eventually bringing them to the point where he could imagine meeting the dream-Blake's luminous brown eyes, saying and meaning, 'I love you.'

At that point Avon fell asleep, as suddenly as if he had been stunned by a heavy fist. He woke with equal abruptness, struggling out of a nightmare to hear a voice say, 'Steady, Avon. Steady.' Blake's voice. Blake's arms warm around him, holding tight. A hallucination, perhaps, but so vivid that he hardly cared. He smiled drowsily, snuggled his cheek into the crook of his arm and slid back into sleep again, comforted.

After that the dream-Blake became even more real. Avon's first imaginings began to seem like adolescent wet dreams: all orgasm, no context. Now, three-quarters convinced by his created world, he needed to know and understand everything. How the rest of the crew might react. How he and Blake, together and separately, would deal with their reactions. How he would cope with a continuing, publicly acknowledged relationship: he who had felt more than a little claustrophobic after snatched hours with a married woman.

How he would cope with Blake himself, the two of them so different in almost every respect.

Since his dream world was merely an alternate reality, not a complete fantasy, he and the dream-Blake would naturally continue to argue, which meant that they would have to find ways of resolving their differences. So Avon found ways, staging confrontations on the flight deck to test their political philosophies, engineering conflicts in bed that stressed the gap between his pragmatic cynicism and Blake's sweeping romanticism. Discovering that he or, just as often, the dream-Blake could come up with exactly the right words to explain what, in the past, they had always found inexplicable in each other. The dream-Blake still seemed to have a life of his own, saying and doing things that Avon felt sure he could never have invented. But he was used to that by now: in fact, he depended on it.

At some stage he decided that his story needed an ending. He looked into the future and saw Blake and himself together in a spacious room, sunlight flooding through the windows, he at the computer, Blake sprawled on a big couch reading a book plaque. Love in a cottage? Now, how on earth could that come about? He pondered the question for a while and then deftly arranged the defeat of the Federation, including a few strategies so inspired that he was tempted to pass them on to the real Blake, supposing he ever had the chance.

**Not that Roj Blake would be likely to take notice of any suggestion that came from me. If I see him again, I should seduce him as well, to make him pay attention.**

Then he flinched away from the thought, heat branding his cheeks in the darkness. Roj Blake and the dream-Blake might have come from the same mould but they had developed very differently. It was, for example, hardly possible to imagine committing himself unreservedly to Roj Blake, an act of folly that would undoubtedly get him killed within a week. The dream-Blake listened to him. Roj Blake did not - although, he supposed, the reverse was also true. He listened to the dream-Blake in a way that he would not have dared listen to Roj Blake's siren songs of universal freedom and justice. He wanted that happy-ever-after ending with the dream-Blake: an ambition that he would not, under any previous circumstances, have suspected himself of harbouring.

It was the first time Avon had ever thought so much about another human being. He realised with awed surprise that he trusted the dream-Blake more than anyone he had met in his life. Never before had he been able to say directly, 'I love you,' not even to Anna. Never before had he felt secure enough to experiment with intimacy. Some part of his brain kept up a warning whisper, 'This is a dream' but the rest of him revelled in the intensity. His cell was no longer a place of confinement: instead, it was boundless as the galaxy. Begun as a survival strategy, the dream had become the purest pleasure he had ever known.

So, when a line of diffuse light marked out the shape of the door and the sound of footsteps assaulted his ears, his first reaction was: **No. Go away. Leave me alone.**

The door eased open. The light hurt his eyes. Tears gushed up in a protective flood but Avon refused to acknowledge them. He lifted his chin and stared at a dark outline that he assumed to be the base commander. Then an unrecognisable voice whispered, 'Avon, what have they done to you?' and he blinked and saw Blake.

Roj Blake, gazing at him with an unguarded expression that Avon had only ever seen in his imagined world. It was more dazzling then the light and it hurt even more. Roj Blake and the dream-Blake, side by side. Frighteningly different and at the same time frighteningly similar.

As he turned his head away, Blake grated, 'Yes, I know. I took my time getting back, especially when it was my fault that they captured you in the first place. You don't need to say anything. I'm well aware of how you must feel about me.'

Before Avon had time to reply, Blake snapped the teleport bracelet around his wrist. Then they were on the Liberator, surrounded by brighter light and a circle of familiar faces, although, still half-blinded, Avon could only focus on Blake, shoulders bowed under his inevitable burden of guilt.

He scowled and said harshly, 'This is another one I owe you, Avon. But I'm sure you'll find a way to make me pay.'

And beside him, the dream-Blake lifted stricken eyes towards Avon and vanished.

Although, of course, it was not quite as simple as that. The dream-Blake had gone but his ghost remained, constantly evoked by the Blake that stalkedthe flight deck. He seemed angrier than ever and Avon, haunted by the dream-Blake, found himself unable to deflect the anger. He hid in his cabin and sat doubled up on the end of his bunk, nursing an intolerable pain: like a sea cucumber that, when touched, spews up its entrails, as though that were a defence. After a while he rubbed a hand across his face and stared at the silvery smear across his palm.

**Oh. Evidently I am crying. Even more unpleasant than I would have imagined.

I shan't do that again.**

A sharp ache probed the space behind his eyes, like a localised migraine. Red-hot filaments wired the left side of his face, twitching at muscles. The sub-audible hum of the Liberator's engines nagged his ears and his heart kept missing a beat and then scurrying to catch up. Still, these were minor distractions, compared to the tidal waves of misery that broke over him whenever he inadvertently thought of the two Blakes. So he tried to think as little as possible and found emptiness to be as terrifying as misery.

**Wonderful. It seems I managed to preserve my sanity in a sensory deprivation cell, only to lose it on Liberator.**

Cally saved him: an unobtrusive habit of hers. At the next between-shift meal she glanced round the table and said with a faintly puzzled frown, 'I came across a term I don't understand, in an Old Earth book I was reading. Imaginary friend. What does that mean?'

Jenna's sharp blue eyes turned hazy. 'I had an imaginary friend called Spike when I was a child,' she said, gazing off into the distance. 'She was incredibly brave, so she showed me how to be brave as well. We went everywhere together and then - oh, I'd almost forgotten! - my aunt insisted on explaining that Spike wasn't real. I cried for a week after that, almost as if someone had died.'

She laughed at herself, embarrassed but moved by the memory, and Cally leaned over to pat her arm. 'Spike was real to you, Jenna,' she said gently. 'You were right to grieve.'

That exchange left Avon with a sense of relief or, at least, with a new understanding of why he felt bereft. Returning to his cabin, he stretched out on his bunk and attempted to grieve for the dream-Blake. It was exhausting. Within an hour he found himself longing to abandon the project and go back to working on Zen. Grief was not his forte: he had never been able to mourn successfully for his brother or for Anna. But the dream had sustained and protected him when he needed it most. If he owed the dream-Blake anything - and he did, far more than he could begin to calculate - he owed him the courtesy of grieving.

He was still avoiding one Blake and trying to grieve for the other when the real Blake tracked him down in the medical unit, where Cally was running her daily tests on his heart and blood pressure.

'Haven't you finished with Avon yet?' he asked irritably. 'I need him for a job on Tenaar, disrupting their transmission systems while Avalon's forces attack the mutoid laboratories.'

'Blake, no!' Cally exclaimed. 'Avon has not yet recovered from the effects of retinal shock. He is malnourished, his blood pressure is well above normal, he is still hypersensitive to light and sound and his balance is -'

'I'm aware of that,' Blake snapped, staring at a point just above Avon's shoulder. 'I wouldn't ask, except that he's the only one of us who knows how to disable a computer in less than five minutes, which is all the time we'll have. Well, Avon? Can you do it or not?'

'I believe I am capable of such a simple operation,' Avon said coolly, although he was not pleased. The dream-Blake's ghost still lurked at the edge of his vision, like the afterimage from a blinding flash of light. He knew that he needed more time to dismantle the dream, before he could feel comfortable with the real Blake.

But Blake wanted him to go down to Tenaar and so he went, materialising in the computer centre and heading straight for the mainframe, while Blake and Vila fended off a bunch of technicians. The transmission codes were as easy to access and block as he had expected. When Blake called, 'Guards, Avon. Are you finished?' he rose in one quick movement and swung around to say, 'Yes.'

Lost his balance and went sprawling to the floor.

A black blur of Federation uniforms. Blake hurtling forward to stand over him. Vila yelping, 'Cally! Cally, get ready to teleport.' Boots trampled across the tiled floor. As Avon struggled to his feet, he saw a guard's baton lift and fall, smashing Blake's wrist and, incidentally, smashing his teleport bracelet.

**Another ninety eight to one chance - but this time Blake is chance's victim.**

Impelled by instinct, he ripped off his bracelet and tossed it to Blake, who shook his head. 'I'm not leaving without you, Avon,' he growled and swung a left-handed punch at the nearest guard.

'Nor I you,' Avon retorted. 'Quick, Blake!'

He slammed a free-standing bench into the knees of three guards bearing down on them. Grabbed Blake's arm, spun him round and dragged him over to a service chute on the far wall. Blake's shoulders stuck in the opening for a second but then he wriggled desperately and was gone. Avon dived after him, plummeting into the dark.

The fall seemed to last a lifetime - long enough, at any rate, to list all the reasons why this had been an extremely bad idea. But when he finally landed with a jarring thud on a mound of rubbish, he was not, after all, in a guard room or a garbage compactor or wedged in some impossibly confined space. The air was breathable, if rank, and the ground appeared to be flagged with stone, covered in sludge from decaying organic matter but otherwise reassuringly solid. The darkness was less reassuring but at least he was used to that.

'So far, so good,' he said cautiously, testing himself for breaks or sprains and finding none. 'What now?'

'This is an old-fashioned sewage tunnel,' Blake told him with the authority of his engineer's training. 'There tends to be a maze of them under any complex built more than fifty standard years ago. They're obviously just using the tunnels for rubbish disposal these days, so with any luck the guards won't know their way around. Still, we'd better get moving, in case -'

He broke off, audibly gritting his teeth. 'No heroics,' Avon warned. 'They would be wasted, since I am the only one here to observe them. Let me examine your wrist, before we go any further.'

Blake laughed shakily. 'All right - but not here. It smells foul. Can we get away from the chute first?'

Avon nodded and then realised Blake could not see him. 'That seems reasonable,' he conceded. 'Here, lean on me.'

He reached for Blake's voice and made contact with warm skin. Blake hooked an arm round his shoulder and they lurched into the blackness, slipping and sliding across piles of rubble. Avon counted off fifty paces and paused to test the stone with his foot. It seemed as clean as it was likely to get. He groped his way towards the side wall, settled Blake against it and felt for his wrist.

The stickiness of congealing blood and a sharp shard of bone, with fresh blood still oozing around it. 'Not an artery or you would be dead by now,' Avon commented. 'But I will need to bind the wound.'

He fed Blake a painkiller from his emergency kit and made a production out of tearing strips off his shirt, to give the pill time to act. Even so, as he straightened Blake's wrist and settled the bone in place, he heard a sharp intake of breath and felt Blake sway on his feet. 'Easy, easy,' he murmured, pulling the makeshift bandage tight. Blake groaned and listed towards him, although seconds later he was already struggling to push himself away from the wall.

'Rest,' Avon commanded, placing a hand on his chest. 'If you are right about these tunnels, the guards will not be looking for us - and besides, Avalon's troops should have distracted them by now. We may have a way to go, before we can get clear of the complex and contact Liberator. I would prefer not to have to carry you.'

'Pragmatic as always,' Blake mumbled in a voice slurred by pain. 'Can't argue with that. Matter of fact, couldn't move right now, if those guards were charging us.'

The echo of their voices faded and silence took over. Silence and darkness, darker than midnight on a moonless planet, darker than the vortex of a black hole: as total and impenetrable as the darkness in the cell on Kaliferon. The parallel was unnerving. Avon flexed his hands, to make sure they existed, and realised that he was taking swift, shallow breaths to avoid disturbing the silence. He closed his eyes against the dark and forced himself to breathe slow and even, taking comfort from the impalpable presence beside him and the small sounds that Blake made as he shifted position slightly.

Then Blake snarled, 'Don't stand so close. There's no need to breathe down my neck.'

'Of course not,' Avon replied courteously.

He took a step into the blackness, felt vertigo grab for him and panicked. Fought the panic down, continued until he arrived at the other wall and leaned there, shaking. Encouraged by the darkness, the hallucinations were beginning to return. Chills wracked his body. A ghost-voice called his name. Chrysanthemum bursts of light flowered behind his eyes. His heart stuttered and raced. Avon teetered and reached instinctively for the dream-Blake but the dream-Blake had gone, replaced by the always-angry man slumped against the far wall.

**I wish I were alone again. The dream was better company.

Although, come to think of it, the dream-Blake was angry at first, before we negotiated. Perhaps the two of them are not quite as separate as I believe.**

For a brief instant he wondered whimsically whether he might some day risk explaining himself to Roj Blake, just as he had once explained himself to the dream-Blake. A transitory impulse, instantly rejected, but the thought of it seemed to lighten the darkness somewhat. Avon smiled unseen, drew in a deep breath and began to calculate the distance that they had fallen, as a method of distracting himself from further thought.

He was mentally reconstructing the plans of the complex, to determine how far they would need to walk, when Blake's voice said, shaken, 'Absolute darkness is ... disconcerting, isn't it? How did you cope in that cell, Avon? What did you think about?' and Avon, with no intention of responding, found himself saying, 'I thought of you.'

Blake chuckled. 'Yes, of course. I suppose you came up with a hundred and one ways of taking Liberator from me.'

It would have been easy to laugh or reply in kind. It was considerably more difficult to say, level and affectless, 'No.'

'What, then?' Blake asked with a sudden change in his voice, impossible to miss but equally impossible to identify.

Avon groped for his last remnants of self-preservation. He cleared his throat and snapped, 'Blake, I may, with some provisos, accept you as commander of the Liberator but I have not yet given you the power to command my thoughts.'

'Neither you have,' Blake agreed, chastened. 'I'm sorry. It's none of my business.'

The silence returned, even thicker and heavier than before. It settled over the two men, disabling them and pinning them to their opposed walls. It seeped into their lungs and stifled them, silence begetting more silence. A prolonged hush, full of unspoken thought and unacknowledged fear, that stretched out interminably until it was broken by a voice whispering, 'You do know, of course, that I've always wanted you, right from that night on the London?'

Avon's heart hammered. **Whose voice? Another hallucination? I could have sworn it was the dream-Blake speaking.** Apparently, he must have spat out an inelegant 'What?' in his confusion because, before he had time to consider, Blake was replying, 'You heard me, Avon.'

'Perhaps I did,' he decided. 'But I am not at all sure I believe you.'

'Why?' Blake demanded, sounding predictably wounded.

'It seems a very oddly timed confession. If it were true, then why not tell me sooner?'

'Because I knew you'd either laugh or kill me - and it might've killed me anyway, if you'd laughed.'

Avon sighed: a soft impatient gust of breath into the darkness. 'Were those the only two alternatives you would allow? Did you never consider the possibility that I might reciprocate?'

'That's hardly likely. You've barely said a civil word to me since we met.'

'True - but I could say the same about you, Blake.'

'Ah, but in my case it was self-defence. I was trying to hide a whole gamut of emotion that didn't appear to interest you in the slightest.'

'Self-defence or self-defeating?' Avon countered. 'I might have been interested, had I known what you were concealing.'

Another interval of silence and then Blake rasped, 'This is absurd. How long are we going to keep manoeuvring to make the other first to say it? I've already told you I want you. Don't you think that deserves an honest answer?' He waited for half a second and added furiously, 'All right then, if you insist, I'll be more specific. When I say I want you, I mean that I - that I love you.'

'Very touching,' Avon said in a thin, dry voice. 'But not very convincing, when you are so resolutely keeping your distance.'

To his surprise, Blake laughed. 'Avon, I don't know where you are. I'm drugged and disoriented. I can't place your voice among all these echoes and I'd feel foolish, groping around in the dark. Believe me, if I knew how to find you, I'd be there.'

More silence. Avon shivered and rubbed his arms. **How disconcerting. For some reason Blake has decided to explain himself, as thoroughly as his dream counterpart ever did. It is, I suppose, my turn to make a concession.**

'I am twelve paces to the north,' he observed finally, 'but I am moving towards you.'

They met in the middle of the tunnel. Blake stretched his hand out and gripped Avon by the forearm, breathing so fast and hard that he was unable to speak. Avon took a step forward to close the gap and wrenched Blake into a brief, violent hug. Then, having propelled himself across that last boundary, he lifted his head and kissed Blake.

The difference between fantasy and reality manifested itself straight away. The kiss was awkward and badly-aimed - mouths colliding, hands fumbling in the dark, Avon shifting to avoid Blake's wounded wrist and almost knocking him sideways. **None of the refinements made possible when one can replay a scene several times to perfect it: but satisfactory, nonetheless.** He wrapped an arm around Blake's waist to anchor them, while he searched Blake's face with fingertips sensitised by the darkness. His cheeks were wet, his mouth tasted of salt and he kept breaking away from the kiss to whisper, 'Avon, are you sure?'

'I'm here,' he said testily after the third repetition. 'How much more do you want?'

'Oh, everything,' Blake said, ruefully amused. 'I want to know this isn't just some passing whim of yours. I want to know I won't be hurt all over again.'

Avon ran a possessive hand down the side of his face, smudging tears across the full, trembling mouth. 'Did I hurt you?' he asked. 'It was inadvertent, I promise. Relax, Blake. I'm not going anywhere.'

He cupped Blake's jaw and tilted it and kissed him in earnest. As their mouths fused, a high voltage charge fired every cell in his body and he could feel an answering jolt of electricity ripple along Blake's spine. He sighed and sent his tongue darting between parted lips, pointed and probing at first, then spreading out to lap at Blake's tongue. Blake made a strangled sound at the back of his throat. He flung his arm across Avon's shoulders to grapple him closer and his mouth crushed down, hard and urgent and insistent.

Fear knifed at Avon's ribs. No. Too close. But his remembered trust in the dream-Blake blocked the fear and turned it aside. He leaned into Blake's embrace, deliberately malleable. Reality ebbed and flowed: a doppler effect. At one moment he was able to register the most minute of details - the small variations in taste as he entered deeper into Blake's mouth, a slight tear in the slippery skin where Blake must have bitten his lip as he fell - although next moment he seemed to dissolve and lose himself in sensation, unable to tell where he ended and Blake began. They clung together, steadying each other, dazzled and overwhelmed. Chests heaving in unison. Hearts thundering. Whispered words in the darkness.

'This is impossible.'

'Why?'

'Because I want you too much.'

'And if you want something, you can't have it? Where is the logic in that, Blake?'

'There's no need to sound superior. I suspect it's just as logical as whatever held you back from me for so long.'

'Ah, that was fear, the most logical emotion in existence. There is, after all, a reason to be afraid of almost everything.'

'But you're not afraid of me any more?'

'On the contrary, I am terrified. I have learned to live with it, that is all. However, I have not become completely irrational. We are still in danger. It is time to leave.'

'... Yes.'

'Now , Blake.'

'Yes, dear heart. Now.'

Even then, it was hard to separate. They made their way down the tunnels shoulder to shoulder, hands outstretched, ready to support or clasp or hold. The minute a glimmer of light eased through the gloom, they turned to scan each other's faces, tentative and questioning. A last tear glittered high on Blake's cheek. When Avon reached out to brush it away, Blake seized his hand and pressed a kiss into the palm.

'I still can't believe this,' he breathed and Avon said, 'But you must.'

He shepherded Blake out into the Tenaar twilight: a three-moon sky, lit by white flashes from distant plasma bolts. The band of blood caked round Blake's wrist made him flinch and frown. 'Bracelet, please,' he said with a snap of his fingers. 'We have to get you back to Liberator.'

'Give me a chance to pull myself together first,' Blake grumbled, still staring at him. He touched his good hand to Avon's cheek and asked compulsively, 'Are you really sure?'

Avon's eyes hooded. 'Blake, you are becoming tedious. Will this convince you?'

Resting both hands on Blake's shoulders, he melted against him with adept pliancy, chest and thigh and groin moulded so close that they might have been naked. When he looked up with a mocking, intimate smile, Blake groaned and said, 'Thank you, Avon. Now I have a painful erection, as well as a painful wrist.'

'There,' Avon said, pleased, 'that's more like your usual form.' He picked Blake's pocket with a skill learned from Vila, activated the teleport bracelet and rapped out, 'Liberator? Bring Blake up and send someone down with an extra bracelet.'

Stood back and watched Blake shimmer and distort as the transfer took him. There and then gone, insubstantial as a dream.

By the time he materialised in the teleport bay, Cally was already hustling Blake off to the medical unit, so Avon headed for the flight deck to contact Avalon. The raid on the laboratories had, it appeared, been successful but a Federation fleet was on its way and Avalon recommended instant departure. Avon worked fast and efficiently, no room in his mind for any other thought or emotion: except, perhaps, a diffuse, subliminal happiness which was easy enough to disregard. The real test was still to come, a nagging question that he kept choosing to ignore.

**How are Blake and I to reconcile the men we were in the darkness under Tenaar with the men we are on the flight deck of Liberator?**

He was monitoring the ship's progress and fielding Vila's routine complaints about their narrow escape when Blake appeared in the doorway and came striding over. Avon turned, hands folded, and studied him through a screen of long eyelashes.

'You're looking demure,' Blake growled in his ear. 'I hate it when you do that.'

'What would you prefer?' Avon inquired, making no attempt to alter his expression.

'Something that at least gives me a hint of what you're thinking. For example, I'd rather like to know whether you're planning to come to my cabin when you've finished here.'

'Well, of course,' he said, pretending puzzlement. 'What did you expect?'

Blake scowled. 'I try to have as few expectations as possible, where you're concerned. That's always worked fairly well in the past.' Avon stared at him, still expressionless, until he flushed and added, 'But perhaps not now. Come on, Kerr.'

He clamped a hand onto Avon's shoulder and steered him towards the exit, while Jenna's back stiffened in shock and Vila watched with open surprise that gradually developed into lecherous comprehension. Avon smiled. **Very gratifying. That is precisely how I predicted they would react.** Then he forgot about his crew mates and, indeed, about everything else but the warm clasp of Blake's fingers, compelling him down the corridor and shunting him into the cabin.

'We need to talk,' Blake said hoarsely, leaning back against the door, but after that his voice dried in his throat. He thrust his hands out, mute and pleading, and Avon reached over to run a meditative thumb along the navy veins of his newly-healed wrist.

The touch seemed to complete a circuit. A galvanic shock flung them together. Blake gave a shout of triumph and swung Avon off his feet, whirling him round and setting him down, laughing as Avon retaliated with a reflex-swift jab at his midriff. They wrestled towards the bed and fell on each other, voracious as starving animals. Caresses that bruised, kisses that seared and scarred, biting at soft skin and hard muscle, tearing away clothes, collapsing in a frenzied tangle, mouths merging, arms straining tight.

Avon fought his way out of the embrace, knelt over Blake's cock and stared avidly. Lush dark curls, rose-red pillar, balls heavy in their chamois sac. **Ah, yes. Just as I fantasised/remembered.** A brief pause to let dream and reality settle into place and then he steadied the swollen shaft between his palms like a worshipper at prayer, took the head into his mouth and tongued the weeping slit. Blake groaned and thrashed: gripped the nape of Avon's neck and held him there for a shuddering second: wrenched him away and straddled him, muttering, 'All of you, I need all of you.'

Then they were rolling and stalling in a chaos of contradictions, irresistible force against immovable object. One minute struggling for dominance and next minute struggling to submit, locked together so close that there was no room for specific touches, only the primitive friction of skin on skin. Sweat stung Avon's mouth. His eyes blurred and the cabin darkened. He sucked breath into aching, empty lungs and realised that he had, for some time, been chanting, 'Yes, Blake. Yes.'

**Such abandon, with someone I know so well? But then, perhaps that knowledge makes this possible.**

Certainly, there was no need to hold back and check Blake's reactions, not when he could read every look and movement. The big hands that kept returning to knead and part his buttocks, the sunburst dazzle in Blake's expressive eyes. Avon nodded and settled back on the pillows, knowing without having to be told that Blake would want to see him while he fucked him. What's more, it seemed that Blake was able to read him as effortlessly as he could read Blake. His gel-slick fingers sensed every infinitesimal resistance, waiting and easing deeper and massaging tight muscle. Recognising the precise moment when Avon lay open and aching for the feel of his cock.

So familiar and yet so different. With the dream-Blake, no matter how vivid the recreation, he could only concentrate on one sensation at a time but now he was assailed by a dozen simultaneous sensations. Sound: the soft slap of Blake's balls against his arse, the terse involuntary cries that kept escaping from him. Scent: Blake's signature smell of honey and cream enfolding him like a protective aura, the sweetly bitter taste of wormwood lingering on his lips. Touch: the maddening rub of Blake's shaft across his prostate, Blake's hand closing, skilful and proprietorial, around his cock. Sight: Blake's eyes steady and reassuring, his teeth sinking into the full curve of his underlip as he paced and controlled himself, matching each thrust and withdrawal to the requests he read from Avon's face. Sensory overload. Avon abandoned his catalogue of details and sank into a mindless trance, pushed deeper down by every movement of Blake's cock, until finally he ended where his dream had begun: the room dark around him and Blake at the centre of it, blazing with light. Orgasm tossed him into a glowing vortex. He fell in leisurely spirals, plummeting out of the light and back into the ordinary world - the grey plass walls of Blake's cabin, the tangled sheets of Blake's bunk, himself sprawled on the mattress, one arm flung across Blake's solid chest. He waited for the self-protective withdrawal that would normally have followed such a profound loss of control but it never came.

**Too late for that. I trust them both, Roj Blake and the dream-Blake. Which, since the dream-Blake was, more or less, a figment of my imagination, seems to imply that I trust my own instincts at last.**

He lay there a moment longer, basking in the heat from Blake's body like a lizard on a rock. Blake was always warm, one of those powerhouse metabolisms that could walk bare-chested through a snowstorm: a quality as irritating and endearing as the man himself. Avon sat up, smiling with deplorable fondness, and caught his lover surreptitiously wiping his eyes.

Blake scowled at the smile and bit down on a knuckle. 'How can you be so calm?' he asked resentfully. 'I was sure you'd fight me all the way - but I'm the one who's finding this difficult. You seem to be your usual impassive self.'

'Ah, but I have had practice,' Avon said without thinking, then winced as Blake inevitably asked, 'What do you mean?'

**Must I tell him? Yes, I suppose so. I have paid my debt of mourning to the dream-Blake but apparently I owe this Blake something as well.**

He was not accustomed to being embarrassed by anything he chose to say but he found that he needed to avert his head before he could begin the story. The was a holographic reproduction tacked to the opposite wall: an oil painting of a Renaissance prince whose Roman profile bore a marked resemblance to his own. Avon kept his eyes fixed on it while he told Blake about the life that he had invented for himself in the cell on Kaliferon, although he was able to monitor Blake's reactions through the convulsive grip on his hand.

When he finished and turned around, Blake was watching him with a frankly besotted expression that he would never have permitted the dream-Blake. 'So how did your story end?' he asked and Avon shrugged.

'Oh, we defeated the Federation and lived happily ever after. It **was** a fantasy, remember.'

Blake sighed. 'A rather pleasant fantasy, though. Do you think we could ...?'

He hitched himself sideways and wrapped his arms round Avon from behind, chin propped on his shoulder as though they were staring, side by side, down the incalculable vistas of the future.

'I don't know, Blake,' Avon told him. 'But we can try.'

 

**Author's Note:**

> Author's Note: The sea-cucumber was lifted from a poem by Martin Johnston and Isobelle Lewis told me the story of Rifka, who survived Ravensbruck by inventing an imaginary family. This story is, accordingly, dedicated to all three of them.


End file.
